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Acknowledging the role the Greek state has played in nationalist patriarchal politics and discourse, this program is an exploration in feminist filmmaking veered at decentering eurocentricism and engaging in feminist lineages of the moving image. Surplus Cinema invites us to convene around contemporary films made by women and non-binary artists living and/or working within the Greek context, in the diaspora or through a diasporic lens.
How can feminist diasporic filmmaking operate as a gesture to unweave oppressions and form cultures of non-hierarchical solidarity? How might centering the overlooked labor of ‘gendered Others' in cinema help create spaces for healing?
Through an intersectional feminist framework, this program looks to the margins of national identity to reconsider and redefine, as well as restructure our ways of looking at a border region that is between east and west, and which has so often been used as a pillar to define (and exclude from) the “European”. By questioning this very pillar, we wish to decenter and turn upside down our ways of looking, listening and understanding other foundations and locations. Through humor, poignancy, joy, handmade cinema and audiovisual pleasure, this program seeks to question the cinema many are used to considering as contemporary ‘Greek Cinema’.
The title “Surplus Cinema” is inspired by Dimitra Kotouza’s book “Surplus Citizens”, which focuses on collective action and identity of ‘subordinate classes’ within a context of ‘crisis’ as a way to explore the transformative and subversive potential of collectivity.
The program is conceived by Christina Phoebe, Elli Vassalou, Maria Christoforidou, Rabab El Mouadden and Geli Mademli.
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